AMERICA:In his memoir 'My Father at 100', Ron Reagan has no place for what he calls the fetishistic veneration of the late president
THE FACE is thinner, the build slighter, but the resemblance is unmistakable, especially the grin, the smile lines around the eyes and the timbre of the voice when Ron Reagan imitates his father.
Reagan is not called "junior" because he and Ronald had different middle names. Now 52, the younger Reagan travelled from his home in the Pacific northwest this week to promote his new memoir, My Father at 100.
Conservatives, including his own half-brother, dislike Ron’s liberal politics. He has written a tender, evocative account of the Old Gipper, who died in 2004.
“Those who want the portrait without a blemish don’t do him a service,” Reagan says in the Washington bookshop where we meet. “When we elect presidents, we elect human beings.”
Reagan rails against the “fetishistic veneration” surrounding his father.
“Beyond a fondness for non- intrusive government and lower taxes . . . he had little in common with the rage-mongering infecting his party today,” Reagan writes. The far right has “commandeered” the late president, he says.
The Tea Party siren Sarah Palin often quotes the older Reagan. "With his optimism and common sense, President Reagan held up a mirror to the American soul to remind us of our exceptionalism," Palin told USA Today.
On February 6th, Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday, commemorations will begin with a video tribute before the Super Bowl.
This year will see the unveiling of a statue in London’s Grosvenor Square, a thanksgiving Mass in Krakow for the man who told the Soviet president to “tear down this wall”, an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London and more besides.
Ron Reagan writes of his father’s “innocent optimism, his guileless wonder at the world”, but also of the late president’s propensity to see events and people not as they were, but as he wished them to be.
In this, he was quintessentially American.
Reagan liked using the thumbs-up gesture. One day, father and son were in a presidential motorcade together.
“A man surged forward from the crowd and got very close to the car,” Ron recalls.
“We couldn’t hear through the bullet-proof glass, but he was promoting a different, one- fingered hand gesture and mouthing a word beginning with ‘mother’ and ending in ‘er’. My father turned to me and said, ‘You see! It’s catching on!’”
The younger Reagan makes a thumbs-up gesture and imitates his father’s voice and grin.
“That was my father to a T,” he says. “He interpreted things the way he wanted them to be.”
Ronald Reagan did much to reverse the Great Society reforms of the 1960s.
“There’s a feeling among some that he was mean-spirited, that he didn’t care about people,” Ron admits.
“If people became an abstract group – ‘the poor’ – he lost the connection. He needed a face, a person.”
Ron tells the story of a woman facing an expulsion order because she couldn’t pay her rent. President Reagan saw her on television one night and sent her a cheque for $2,000.
“A few nights later, he saw the same woman; she’d framed his cheque. He said, ‘That’s not what I intended,’ and wrote her another cheque with a note saying: ‘CASH this one’.”
Reagan loved his Irish heritage, Ron says, but preferred legend to the stark facts of the mid-19th century.
“Thomas and Michael O’Regan came from a wattle and daub hut in Doolis, a few miles from Ballyporeen. Perhaps he associated them too closely with his father Jack, who drank and fought with his mother.”
As Ron writes in his book, the president was more interested in “the great tenth-century Irish warrior king Brian Boru, a red-bearded, sword-wielding Dark Ages hero”, whose nephew Reagan believed to be his progenitor.
“He was a storyteller from a long line of storytellers, and his best story was himself,” says Ron.
The most controversial passage of Reagan’s book is his assertion that his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s may have started while he was still in office.
During a debate against Walter Mondale in 1984 – 10 years before Reagan announced he suffered from the disease – “My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with his notes, uncharacteristically lost for words,” Ron writes.
Reagan loyalists, including Michael Reagan (65), who was adopted by Ronald and his first wife, film star Jane Wyman, have accused Ron of using a “cheap trick” to sell books.
“My father was in his mid-70s. He hated hearing aids and he’d nearly been killed,” Ron says.
“That takes a lot out of you. In retrospect, maybe those glimmers were signs. We now know that the disease unfolds over decades.”
Michael Reagan insisted in a recent Twitter posting: “My father did not suffer from Alzheimer’s in the 80s. Ron, my brother, was an embarrassment to my father when he was alive and today he became an embarrassment to his mother.”
The former first lady Nancy Reagan will turn 90 on July 6th. “She’s sharp as a tack,” says Ron. “She told me she loved the book.”
